Reality and Love
More from E. Stanley Jones in the early 70s:
"To be universal we do not have to be less Christian. For the truly Christian person is the most universal person in the world. He becomes more universal when he becomes more Christian.

If the church of this age marries the spirit of this age, then in the next generation it will be a widow. For this generation of secularism will be succeeded by another generation of secularism with its culture and its language and its outlook. For secularism has no fixed basis; it is the result of drives that ebb and flow and go the way of pressures.

We must be fixed to something universal and timeless. There are two things that are universal and timeless: reality and love. When you have reality and when you apply that reality by love you are universal and can speak to any age and are at home in any age and vital in any age. But to ape an age to get that age is futile. This age of youth has an acute nose for unreality and when youth sense that you are using their language and dress and outlook to catch them, they turn from you as "a phony." The head of the Campus Crusade for Christ in Canada told me that they tried aping the young people to get them—adopting their language, their dress, and growing their beards. They found it a failure. The youth saw through it. The Campus Crusade for Christ gave up emphasis on costume and returned to the emphasis on Christ; gave up emphasis on "campus" and returned to conversion. Now they were back in their native element—not fish flopping on an alien shore, but fish back in their native element again, at home! Not playing a part, but natural.

When the nonviolent, noncooperation movement for independence for India was on, the wearing of white homespun and handwoven khadi dress was the sign of a nationalist, one who wanted independence for India and who said so by the wearing of khadi. I felt I must identify myself with the movement for independence. So I wore khadi in public meetings to give public addresses. It was politically dangerous, for I might be sent out of India by the British. I asked a missionary what he thought of my wearing khadi and he said: "I think it is appropriate—for it expresses your inward attitudes. You believe in India's independence and are saying so." So now that India has her independence I still wear khadi at the Ashram at Sat Tal. They now know that it not a pose, but a position. But if I had used khadi to curry favor with the nationalists they would have seen through it at once. The fact that the president of India asked me to contribute a chapter to the National Memorial Volume to Mahatma Gandhi on the centenary commemoration of his birth, 1968, is proof that the country accepted me as a real friend of India in spite of, and maybe, in the minds of many, on account of, the fact that I am an evangelist of the Good News of Jesus Christ. Perhaps they saw in him I have reality and I hope they see him applied in love.

Reality and love are the two sides of the master key that will unlock the door to any situation. In the reconstruction of the church we must have reality and we must apply it in love."

I felt this quote applied to some of our recent conversations about branding, emergent, etc. It is amazing how this 80 year old missionary was saying things so long ago that still apply today. Perhaps the answer to the question "What does it look like?" in regards to the Church can only be answered by saying that we are in a constant state of renewal and struggle.

posted by Jimmy at 10:03 PM | |